by CT Grey
“And before you say anything,” he added. “I want you to think if a bit of anarchy is actually a scary prospect, when their nanny states have made them so emasculated. Impotent. Paralysed even. And to be absolutely frank, I could even say they are just so locked in. There is no thrill when we hunt. The prey doesn’t even put up a fight anymore, when not so long ago, you could at least expect a punch in the face. And those guys weren’t missing a thought, when today they are mostly non-combatants. Almost like sheep. Can you believe that?”
“Are you serious?” I asked, as I couldn’t believe what he was saying. But I didn’t need to hear his reply as I could see it in his eyes. He was deadly serious. Someone could have even claimed he’d gone mad. Men of his age had often lost more than a few bats from their bell tower. But what he was actually saying was he wanted them to fight for their lives, for their ultimate survival as if the hunting was some noble sport. But even then I’d no choice but to ask: “Have you forgotten something?”
“You mean the dead?” Damien answered quickly. “No, I haven’t…” he grinned wolfishly. “They are part of the plan. All counted in. Trust me. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
I tilted my head slightly, and quickly glanced at Jaq from corner of my eye. She had calmed down and was now resting peacefully, and I thought it was better to I drop in the next question: “And Alison was part of that same plan, was she?”
“Now, now my dear.” Damien revealed his fangs. “Be careful what you’re—”
“I got to admit,” Morgana said in Hungarian. “You were right. She’s brilliant.”
“Thank you,” I replied, in Hungarian. “I should have known you two are alike, but at the same time so different. You’re like two sides of the same monster: one of you claims to be good and while the other knows already that he’s heinously bad…”
To which Morgana raised her hand and said, “I wonder what made you turn against our kind…”
“Could you stop talking in that language,” Canaan grumbled. “I cannot understand a word.”
“Poor big man,” Morgana mocked the black man on her side. “All muscle, no brains.”
“Morgana,” Damien raised his voice.
“Damien,” I cut in. “Answer my question, please.”
“I don’t think he will,” Morgana stepped forward and came towards me. Her hand rested on his back when she stopped next to him. “This is a sensitive subject after all. You have love for the mortals, and he’s like the Prince of Lies, so similar to the Fallen One.” She stopped at front of me and looked into my eyes. “But it wasn’t his idea to use Alison. It was mine. Allow me to show you.”
In a flash I saw a shard of silver striking towards Jaq.
“Don’t!” I wrapped my fingers around the machete hilt.
She stopped and then withdrew her hand, and I saw her holding a small knife between her fingers. “All I need is a drop of blood,” she snarled. “And she has so much of that precious… sweet… blood.”
I tossed my smoke to one side and wrapped my other hand around her wrist. “None of that is yours. The prey is mine, and mine alone. And what I asked, he hasn’t answered. So I don’t need your blood magic, but an answer.”
She tried to pull her hand away but I didn’t let her go. “I’m warning you, sister…”
“Damien,” Morgana raised her voice. “Do something.”
“Yeah.” I let her arm go. “Listen to her and give me the answer: why Alison?”
“Your bitch has some serious balls,” Canaan commented as Damien’s shoulders slumped like cow’s tail after shitting. “Boss.”
“Shut up,” Damien snapped at him. “I’m in charge here. And yes, it was Morgana’s idea to use her. She had a man inside and we needed to kick-start…” Suddenly he frowned. It was as if he’d seen my thoughts, and he asked: “What?”
“Nothing.” I shook my head innocently. “Go on.”
“This is not easy, you know,” Damien said. “She was chosen to allow Morgana’s man to get inside the bunker. And to be honest, I would have preferred to take someone else, but there were none as good as her. She was a marvellous specimen.” Even though I wanted to stop him I couldn’t. Not when he was so busy exposing bits and pieces of the Fallen One’s agenda. “And what a perfect screamer she made. She was so vicious. So fast to take down anyone, who tried to stop her, when she came out of the basement as the leader of her pack.”
“Look,” Morgana giggled. “I’ll show you.”
*** Henrik ***
I dropped the pen and rubbed my eyes. What she was telling me was going too far, too fast for me to believe that the genocide we’d started had been part of the Damned’s plan for world domination. “Sorry,” I said. “But I cannot for the life of me understand how he would have made his way inside Thames House. I mean, he could not have just walked in, and if he was one of those three that we saw in the vid, we have no record of him in our archives.”
“I wasn’t in your archives either,” Jane said. “Was I?”
“No. You were not. And I’d have thought that all of the major—”
“We’ve been hiding for centuries in plain sight,” Jane said. “So there’s no way you could have listed all the major players, when you didn’t even knew that the Damned, nor for that matter, the Redeemed, existed. No way. Even if you knew that some of us existed, which I highly doubt. ”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and asked, “Why is it so?”
Jane waited until I had put my glasses back on before she said: “Because we are not always in this realm. What you had here was a human world. You were the king and like I told you, we were not allowed to take that throne. Now, it’s quite different.”
“How?”
“It’s complicated,” Jane answered. “But let me put it another way. All around the world you can see hints from older civilisations. Some of them far older and more technologically-advanced cultures than the historians want to admit. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you had used some of those findings in here.”
She grinned as if she was asking ‘am I right?’ And to be honest, from what I knew about site A and B, and how we got there, were because of technologies that should had been way beyond our current technological level. The Portal was a good example. Of course, it had been portrayed in many science fiction novels, but if what Jane was saying was the truth, then some of those inventions weren’t from the head of our scientists. Then again, as I thought about it, I bet it wouldn’t be a complete surprise if one morning an alien popped into my office to ask for a favour. But what she was saying I wasn’t sure.
“What do those things have to do with anything?”
Jane shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what her ears were hearing. “The virus, you are studying in your laboratories, is far older than you have been led to believe,” she said. “Trust me, I know. And there are a whole lot of things the Underworld has been hiding from you for millennia. But when you unleashed the virus in the world, you changed things. In other words, you started the change and the Damned are using the opportunity to claim the throne.”
“Really?”
Jane lit another cigarette and said, “Yeah.”
“And there’s nothing we can do about that?”
She glanced at Sergeant Red before saying, “Of course there’s something you can do, but whether you are willing to do it, is another question.”
I followed her gaze and asked: “Do you mean we should put up a fight?”
“Yeah,” she nodded her head. “What you’re doing now isn’t enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Instead of putting all your resources together you have abandoned people, and left them to fend for themselves against the dead. But that won’t last, because the dead will win eventually, if they haven’t already surpassed the number of the living. And if they have, you my love, have lost the game forever.”
I thought what she’d said for a moment and then asked the only question that I thought would
matter in this stage. “But don’t you need the living as well?”
She nodded sharply. “To a point, yes, we do,” Jane answered. “But to be honest, we would never let those numbers to go down to a level, where we couldn’t sustain them. And even if that did happen, there’s you, the fresh stock.”
“Fresh stock,” I repeated her words. “You make it sound like we’re cattle.”
“Or sardines,” Jane suggested. “And to get to you we would need a bloody big can opener, if you get what I mean.” A second later, when I picked up the pen to write down the details, she added: “You’re such a spoilsport, no sense of humour at all.”
“I would say this is a matter that shouldn’t be taken so lightly.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But even if it’s—”
“Even then,” I said without lifting my eyes from the notepad. “I wouldn’t be joking. This is a serious matter. People’s lives are at risk.”
“Mister Jackson.” Jane leaned forward to slap her hand over my notebook. “People’s lives are always at risk. You cannot touch anything without risking an infection. Yet, people go around and do that, anyway. I’m talking about things that are more serious.”
“Like…?”
Jane shot her hands in the air. “Like having a house full of walkers.”
“And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it?” I argued. “If that’s the case than you can drop it, because I can admit that we had type ones in Thames House, but they were all secured, or so we thought, until the screamers started running all over the place. There was nothing we could have done to make things any safer. Absolutely nothing!”
“Well.” Jane tapped ash off from end of the cigarette and looked extremely displeased with my argument. “In the first place, you should not have brought them in, but then again, if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be in this position. So it’s pointless fighting over what could have happened in this and that case, yeah? But the point I’m trying to make to you is that we should shift our attention towards the future and start preparing for the inevitable.”
“Which is?”
“That the Damned are going to come to get you out of this hole.”
“They can try,” I said vehemently. “But first they need to get in…”
She looked into my eyes and asked: “Have you forgotten something? They already have people inside your base, and it’s not like they’re going to need that ‘can opener’ to get in since the Clan has come out to aid the Damned.”
I flipped a few pages and said, “You mean Morgana.”
“Yeah,” Jane glared at me as if I’d suddenly become stupid. “The witches don’t need technology to get what they need.”
“The witches?” escaped from my lips as I realised what she meant about the Clan. And I had no choice but to raise my hand to scratch my head, physically as well as metaphorically, as I realised we had never considered, or even thought that magic could have played a factor in our predictions. Why would we? It didn’t exist, as far as we were concerned. Just like vampires didn’t.
“There are lot of things that I haven’t talked about, yet.” Jane sighed out loud as she stared into the distance for a moment before she continued: “In fact, I don’t think I should even mention them, since time is of the essence, and we need to go out there to organise resistance, if you lot want to survive the turmoil.”
Even if I was surprised that she was getting to the point I wanted to talk about. I crossed my fingers and said, “Before we go there, could you talk to me about the magic?”
Jane bit her bottom lip and then started talking. “I sensed that Morgana was full of it, when I first laid my eyes upon that woman, and she wasn’t kidding, when she said: ‘Look, I’ll show you.’”
*** Jane ***
She opened her palm at front of me and then tapped her knife on the eyeball that rested there, so a drop of blood dribbled onto it. All the while she mumbled arcane words, and as the ancient language wrapped itself around it, green wisps of gas began gathering underneath the eyeball. As though rising like steam from the blood trickling down over the skin of the organ. And just as first drop reached her palm, the eyeball shot in the air, expanding a thousand fold as it instantly created a soul-gate to the nether realm.
And in that gate, I could see Alison writhing on the ground, scratching her face, her eyes, as she went through the transformation. It didn’t take long before she lay still on the floor, and then a few moments later, her back arched and she endured violent trembles as the gangrenous veins crisscrossed over her skin. When the shakes finally stopped, she took a first breath and opened her bloodshot eyes that were full of anger; hatred towards mankind. And I knew she was no longer.
The Alison I’d known had gone to a better place, and there was nothing Morgana could have showed to make any difference. The abomination Damien had killed had not been my friend, even if she had borrowed her face. But there was one thing in the images that caught my attention, when Alison gathered her crew and made them charge out from the basement. And that was the secret door that Morgana’s man used, while the screamers assaulted the surprised-looking armed guards.
It was a door that led to a room unlike I had ever seen, and what was important was that it seemed to have power, and the guards that weren’t scared as they ushered last group of people through a massive vault door, while they kept Alison’s monsters away. And although that image only lasted a fraction of moment, I knew it was the place I had to go.
It was the place where I could possibly find some answers and if I were lucky, an ally to fight the war against the Damned kind.
So, while Damien’s lot were mesmerised at the massacre, with glee in their eyes, I made my move and pulled Jaq up off the ground. I hauled her over my shoulder and darted the over the corpses as fast as I could go.
“Hey,” Damien shouted as I took a turn into the secretary’s office. “Stop.”
“Never,” I exhaled as my feet pumped under me and carried us into the glass house. There was no point trying to reason with him. I knew my husband, and over the centuries I’d learned more than a few things about his devious nature. And if there was one thing that scared me, it was his enjoyment of sacrificing people to advance his plans. And having lost Alison, Jaq was the next one in the line, as I couldn’t see any other soul he could have consumed to forge another undead champion.
I wasn’t prepared to let him take my last friend, and promised to do everything in my power to save her. I flew across the glasshouse checkered floorboards and went straight into the arched hallway. I heard him shout.
“Get her!”
It scared me. Probably more than anything I’d come across, as I’d not forgotten how scary those words had been to any victims we’d chased down over the centuries. Then again, this time, he wasn’t alone, as I could already hear shamblers and screamers waking up in and around Thames House.
Damien’s lot might have cleared one room, and the initial source of the infection, but they’d not cleared the whole place. Far from it, and if they were against me, they were also against him and his lackeys. So as I turned the corner I shifted Jaq to a better position on my shoulder, and then started making ruckus.
If there was an empty can, I kicked it. A shelving unit, I pulled it down. A mirror, shattered. I used anything and everything to make noise or create an obstacle, as I ran towards the central staircase. And my efforts didn’t go unnoticed. When I reached the marble stairs, not only did I hear their growls and screams echoing throughout the building, but I could see the walking dead literally coming out every doorway, room or hole in the wall. They were crawling over the barricades, obstacles, anything on their way to get into the staircase to get that last thing, that last victim, as if there were no other souls left in the world.
“Come and get me,” I shouted as I charged down the stairs. And they did. The dead didn’t hesitate try to grab me. In fact, while some raised their hands, others literally launched themselves in the air. But I didn’t stop, just d
odged left and right, when I heard from above, “Jane, please, stop!”
I quickly glanced upwards and saw Canaan standing at the edge of the top flight. He was directly looking at Damien flapping a pair of black, torn wings that Morgana was now casting on his back.
“You wuss,” I shouted, as I stopped in my tracks and climbed on the railing. “You’ll never catch us by relying on her.” Then I jumped and let the gravity to do its work. It was a desperate plan. More uncertain than I wanted to execute, but I knew I’d no choice but to try to get some distance between them and us. And the jump into the lobby that was quickly filling with all kind of zombies was pure and utter madness.
Especially, when I had such a precious load on my shoulders.
When the heels of my boots touched the concrete I had to do the only thing I could, and let go of Jaq. She flew forward and landed against a pair of walkers, bowling them over while I made a barrel roll. Then I heard a couple of heavy thumps and looked over my shoulder as I regained my footing. In the middle of the floor, next to an undead, split from head to groin stood Canaan with his bloodied battle-axe.
“Shit.” I gasped as I realised Canaan wasn’t going to be alone for long. Damien would soon be joining the massacre. And knowing how fast the trio had disposed of Alison’s group in the upstairs office, I doubted that a hundred-odd undead nightmares were going to present them a permanent obstacle.
Unlike me who was screaming: “Get off her,” when a zombie was about to snap his choppers on my girl’s limp arm. I shoved my foot down and ripped Jaq’s arm out of his hands. And just as they were reaching to grab me, I tossed her back over my shoulder and headed away from the entrance that had started to get absolutely stuck with the masses of walkers that had gathered around the house, now all trying to get in.
I didn’t get far, before the whole army of dead surged towards me. I was chopping their hands, legs, heads when suddenly they stopped. They zombies turned their gazes upwards and became still as a blue web of energy came descended to the ground. I thanked the Lord for giving me another chance as I dived under the web, and pushed my way through the crowd till I reached another set of stairs leading downwards in a small, easily unnoticeable corridor.